LIBERAL THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
To appear in: Jeffrey L. Dunoff and Mark A. Pollack, eds., International Law andInternational Relations: The State of the Art (forthcoming, 2012).CNCT14Liberal Theories of International LawAndrew MoravcsikLiberal theories of international relations (IR) focus on the demands of individualsand social groups, and their relative power in society, as fundamental forces drivingstate policy and, ultimately, world order. For liberals, every state is embedded in aninterdependent domestic and transnational society that decisively shapes the basicpurposes or interests that underlie its policies. This “bottom-up” focus of liberaltheories on state–society relations, interdependence, and preference formation hasdistinctive implications for understanding international law (IL). Accordingly, inrecent years liberal theory has been among the most rapidly expanding areas ofpositive and normative analysis of international law. As the world grows more andmore interdependent and countries struggle to maintain cooperation amidst diverseeconomic interests, domestic political institutions, and ideals of legitimate publicorder, international law will increasingly come to depend on the answers to questionsthat liberal theories pose.I am grateful to Chris Kendall and Justin Simeone for excellent research assistance and forstylistic and substantive input, and to William Burke-White, Jeffrey Dunoff, LaurenceHelfer, Mark Pollack, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and participants at a conference at TempleUniversity Beasley School of Law for detailed comments,
2The first section of this chapter (“Liberal Theories of InternationalRelations”) elaborates the assumptions and conclusions of liberal internationalrelations theory. Section II (“What Can Liberal Theories Tell Us about InternationalLaw Making?”) develops liberal insights into the substantive scope and depth ofinternational law, its institutional form, compliance, and long-term dynamicprocesses of evolution and change. Section III (“International Tribunals: LiberalAnalysis and Its Critics”) examines the specific case of international tribunals, whichhas been a particular focus of liberal theorizing, and treats both conservative andconstructivist criticisms of liberal theory. Section IV (“Liberalism as NormativeTheory”) considers the contribution of liberal theory to policy, as well as toconceptual and normative, analyses of international law.AI. Liberal Theories of International RelationsThe central liberal question about international law and politics is: who governs?Liberals assume that states are embedded in a transnational society comprised ofindividuals, social groups, and substate officials with varying assets, ideals andinfluence on state policy. The first stage in a liberal explanation of politics is toidentify and explain the preferences of relevant social and substate actors as afunction of a structure of underlying social identities and interests. Among thesesocial and substate actors, a universal condition is globalization, understood astransnational interdependence, material or ideational, among social actors. It createsvarying incentives for cross-border political regulation and interaction. State policycan facilitate, block, or channel globalization, thereby benefitting or harming the
3interests or ideals of particular social actors. The state is a representative institutionthat aggregates and channels those interests according to their relative weight insociety, ability to organize, and influence in political processes. In each state,political organization and institutions represent a different subset of social andsubstate actors, whose desired forms of social, cultural, and economicinterdependence define the underlying concerns (preferences across “states of theworld”) that the state has at stake in international issues. Representative functions ofinternational organizations may have the same effect.The existence of social demands concerning globalization, translated into statepreferences, is a necessary condition to motivate any purposeful foreign policyaction. States may seek to shape and regulate interdependence. To the extent thiscreates externalities, positive or negative, for policy-makers in other states seeking torealize the preferences of their individuals and social groups, such preferencesprovides the underlying motivation for patterns of interstate conflict and cooperation.Colloquially, what states want shapes what they do.Liberal theory highlights three specific sources of variation in statepreferences and, therefore, state behavior. Each isolates a distinctive source ofvariation in the societal demands that drive state preferences regarding the regulationof globalization. To avoid simply ascribing policy changes to ad hoc or unexplainedpreference changes, liberal theory seeks to isolate the causal mechanisms andantecedent conditions under which each functions. In each case, as the relevant
4domestic and transnational social actors and contexts vary across space, time, andissues, so does the distribution of state preferences and policies.Ideational liberal theories attribute state behavior to interdependence amongsocial demands to realize particular forms of public goods provision. These demandsare, in turn, based on conceptions of desirable cultural, political, and socioeconomicidentity and order, which generally derive from both domestic and transnationalsocialization processes. Common examples in modern world politics includeconceptions of national (or civic) identity and self-determination, fundamentalpolitical ideology (such as democratic capitalism, communism, or Islamicfundamentalism), basic views of how to regulate the economy (social welfare, publicrisk, environmental quality), and the balance of individual rights against collectiveduties. The starting point for an ideational liberal analysis of world politics is thequestion: How does variation in ideals of desirable public goods provision shapeindividual and group demands for political regulation of globalization?Commercial liberal theories link state behavior to material interdependenceamong societal actors with particular assets or ideals. In international politicaleconomy, conventional “endogenous policy” theories of trade, finance, andenvironment posit actors with economic assets or objectives, the value of whichdepends on the actors’ position in domestic and global markets (i.e., patterns ofglobalization). The starting point for a commercial liberal analysis of world politics isthe question: How does variation in the assets and market position of economicactors shape their demands for political regulation of globalization?
5Republican liberal theories stress the role of variation in politicalrepresentation. Liberals view all states (and, indirectly, international organizations) asmechanisms of political representation that privilege the interests of some societalactors over others in making state policy. Instruments of representation includeformal representation, constitutional structure, informal institutional dynamics,appointment to government, and the organizational capacity of social actors. Bychanging the “selectorate” – the individuals and groups who influence a policy – thepolicy changes as well. The starting point for a republican liberal analysis of worldpolitics is the question: How does variation in the nature of domestic representationalter the selectorate, thus channeling specific social demands for the politicalregulation of globalization?Although for analytical clarity we customarily distinguish the three categoriesof liberal theory, they are generally more powerful when deployed in tandem.Interdependence often has significant implications for both collective goodsprovision (ideational liberalism) and the realization of material interests (commercialliberalism). Moreover, whether underlying preferences are ideational or material,they are generally represented by some institutionalized political process that skewsrepresentation (republican liberalism). Even the simplest conventional theories of thepolitical economy of international trade, for example, assume that all three strandsare important: private economic interest is balanced against collective welfareconcerns, whether in the form of a budget constraint or countervailing public policy
6goals, and these social pressures are transmitted to the state through representativeinstitutions that privilege some voices over others (Grossman and Helpman 1994).It is important to be clear what liberal theory is not. Theoretical paradigms ininternational relations are defined by distinctive causal mechanisms that linkfundamental causes, such as economic, technological, cultural, social, political, andbehavioral changes among states in world politics, to state behavior. Hence the termliberal is not used here to designate theories that stress the importance ofinternational institutions; the importance of universal, altruistic, or utopian values,such as human rights or democracy; or the advancement of left-wing or free marketpolitical parties or policies. In particular, institutionalist regime theory, pioneered byRobert Keohane and others, often termed “neo-liberal,” is distinctly different.Kenneth Abbott has written that:EXT Institutionalism analyzesthe benefits that international rules,organizations, procedures, and other institutions provide for states inparticular situations, viewing these benefits as incentives for institutionalizedcooperation . [R]elatively modest actions – such as producing unbiasedinformation, reducing the transactions costs of interactions, pooling resources,monitoring state behavior, and helping to mediate disputes – can help statesachieve their goals by overcoming structural barriers to cooperation (2008: 6).This institutionalist focus on the reduction of informational transaction costs differsfrom the focus of liberalism, as defined here, on variation in social preferences—even if the two can coexist, with the former being a means of achieving the latter.
7The distinctiveness of liberal theories also does not stem from a unique focuson “domestic politics.” True, liberal theories often accommodate and explaindomestic distributional and political conflict better than most alternatives. Yet, it isunclear what a purely “domestic” theory of rational state behavior would be, liberalor otherwise. Liberal theories are international in at least three senses. First, in theliberal view, social and state preferences are driven by transnational material andideational globalization, without which liberals believe foreign policy has noconsistent purpose. Second, liberal theories stress the ways in which individuals andgroups may influence policy, not just in domestic but in transnational politics. Socialactors may engage (or be engaged by) international legal institutions via domesticinstitutions, or they may engage them directly. They may organize transnationally topursue political ends. The liberal assumption that political institutions are conduitsfor political representation is primarily directed at nation-states simply because theyare the preeminent political units in the world today; it may also apply to subnational,transnational, or supranational institutions. Third, liberal theories (like realist,institutionalist, systemic constructivist theories, and any other intentionalist accountof state behavior) are strategic and thus “systemic” in the sense that Kenneth Waltz(1979) employs the term: they explain collective international outcomes on the basisof the interstate distribution of the characteristics or attributes of states, in this casetheir preferences. The preferences of a single state alone tell us little about itsprobable strategic behavior with regard to interstate interaction, absent knowledge ofthe preferences of other relevant states, since liberals agree that state preferences and
8policies are interdependent and that the strategic games states play matter for policy –assumptions shared by all rationalist theories.The critical quality of liberal theories is that they are “bottom-up”explanations of state behavior that focus on the effect of variations in state–societyrelations on state preferences in a context of globalization and transnationalinterdependence. In other words, liberalism emphasizes the distribution of oneparticular attribute (socially determined state preferences about the regulation ofsocial interdependence), rather than attributes favored by other major theories (e.g.,coercive power resources, information, or nonrational standards of appropriatestrategic behavior). Indeed, other theories have traditionally defined themselves incontrast to the liberal emphasis on social preferences.AII. What Can Liberal Theories Tell Us About InternationalLaw Making?Liberal theories can serve as the “front-end” for multicausal syntheses with othertheories of institutions, explaining the substance of legal regimes; can generate theirown distinctive insights into the strategic and institutional aspects of legal regimes;and can provide explanations for the longer-term dynamic evolution of internationallaw. Let us consider each in turn.A. Liberal Explanations for the Substantive Scope and Depthof International LawBOne way to employ liberal theory is as the first and indispensable step in any analysisof international law, focusing primarily on explaining the substantive content of
9international interaction. Explaining the substantive focus of law, a task at which fewIR theories excel, is a particular comparative advantage of liberal theory. Realismand institutionalism seek to explain the outcome of strategic interaction or bargainingover substantive matters, but they take as given the basic preferences, and hence thesubstance, of any given interaction. Constructivists do seek to explain the substantivecontent of international cooperation, but do so not as the result of efforts to realizematerial interests and normative ideals transmitted through representativeinstitutions, but rather as the result of conceptions of appropriate behavior ininternational affairs or regulatory policy divorced from the instrumental calculationsof societal actors empowered by the state.For liberals, the starting point for explaining why an instrumental governmentwould contract into binding international legal norms, and comply with themthereafter, is that it possesses a substantive purpose for doing so. From a liberalperspective, this means that a domestic coalition of social interests that benefitsdirectly and indirectly from particular regulation of social interdependence is morepowerfully represented in decision making than the countervailing coalition of losersfrom cooperation – compared to the best unilateral or coalitional alternatives. This issometimes mislabeled a realist (“interest-based”) claim, yet most such formulationsfollow more from patterns of convergent state preferences than from specific patternsof state power (e.g., Abbott 2008). Thus, liberals have no reason to disagree withJack Goldsmith and Eric Posner’s claim that much important state behaviorconsistent with customary international law arises from pure coincidence
10(independent calculations of interest or ideals), the use of IL as a coordinationmechanism (in situations where symmetrical behavior increases payoffs), or the useof IL to facilitate cooperation where coordinated self-restraint from short-termtemptation increases long-term issue-specific payoffs (as in repeated bilateralprisoners’ dilemma, where payoffs to defection and discount rates are low)(Goldsmith and Posner 1999: 1127). Contrary to Goldsmith and Posner, however,liberals argue that such cases do not exhaust the potential for analyzing or fosteringlegalized cooperation. The decisive point is that if social support for and oppositionto such regulation varies predictably across time, issues, countries, andconstituencies, then a liberal analysis of the societal and substate origins of suchsupport for and against various forms of regulation is a logical foundation for anyexplanation of when, where, and how regulation takes place (Keohane 1982; Legro1997; Milner 1997; Moravcsik 1997; Lake and Powell 1999; Wendt 1999).The pattern of preferences and bargaining outcomes helps define theunderlying “payoffs” or “problem structure” of the “games” states play – and,therefore, help define the basic potential for cooperation and conflict. This generatesa number of basic predictions, of which a few examples must suffice here. Forliberals, levels of transnational interdependence are correlated with the magnitude ofinterstate action, whether essentially cooperative or conflictual. Without demandsfrom transnationally interdependent social and substate actors, a rational state wouldhave no reason to engage in world politics at all; it would simply devote its resourcesto an autarkic and isolated existence. Moreover, voluntary (noncoercive) cooperation,
11including a sustainable international legal order that generates compliance andevolves dynamically, must be based on common or compatible social purposes. Thenotion that some shared social purposes may be essential to establish a viable worldorder, as John Ruggie observes (1982), does not follow from realist theory – even ifsome realists, such as Henry Kissinger, assumed it (1993 79). The greater thepotential joint gains and the lower the domestic and transnational distributionalconcerns, the greater the potential for cooperation. Within states, every coalitiongenerally comprises (or opposes) individuals and groups with both “direct” and“indirect” interests in a particular policy: direct beneficiaries benefit from domesticpolicy implementation, whereas indirect beneficiaries benefit from reciprocal policychanges in other states (Trachtman 2010). Preferences help explain not only therange of national policies in a legal issue, but also the outcome of interstatebargaining, since bargaining is often decisively shaped by asymmetricalinterdependence – the relative intensity of state preferences for inside and outsideoptions (Keohane and Nye 1977). States that desire an outcome more will pay more –either in the form of concessions or coercion – to achieve it.Trade illustrates these tendencies. Shifts in comparative advantage and intraindustry trade over the past half-century have generated striking cross-issuevariations in social and state preferences. Trade creates coalitions of direct andindirect interests: importers and consumers, for example, generally benefit from tradeliberalization at home, whereas exporters generally benefit from trade liberalizationabroad. Patterns of trade matter as well. In industrial trade, intra-industry trade and
12investment means liberalization is favored by powerful economic interests indeveloped countries, and cooperation has led to a massive reduction of trade barriers.A long period of exogenous change in trade, investment, and technology created ashift away from North–South trade and a post–World War II trade boom amongadvanced industrial democracies. Large multinational export and investment interestsmobilized behind it, creating ever-greater support for reciprocal liberalization,thereby facilitating efforts to deepen and widen Generalized Agreement on Tariffsand Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) norms (Gilligan 1997a). Inagriculture, by contrast, inter-industry trade patterns and lack of developed-countrycompetitiveness has meant that powerful interests oppose liberalization, andagricultural trade has seen a corresponding increase in protection. Both policies havemassive consequences for welfare and human life. In trade negotiations, as liberaltheory predicts, asymmetrical interdependence is also a source of bargaining power,with governments dependent on particular markets being forced into concessions orcostly responses to defend their interests.More recently, as developed economies h
This “bottom-up” focus of liberal theories on state–society relations, interdependence, and preference formation has distinctive implications for understanding international law (IL). Accordingly, in recent years liberal theory has been among the most rapidly expanding areas of positive and normative analysis of international law.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 63-81 Learning Objectives 63 Key Terms 63 Role Theories 65 Motivational Theories 67 Learning Theories 69 Cognitive Theories 73 Symbolic Interaction Theories 75 Socio-Cultural Theories 77 Evolutionary Theories 78 Summary and review 80 review QueStionS 81 4. SELF AND IDENTITY 82-107
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES Suffolk County Communltv Collen St. John's University 1 Liberal Arts and Sciences: General Studies A.A. Psychology B.A. 2 Liberal Arts and Sciences: General Studies A.A. Government and Politics B.A. 3 Liberal Arts and Sciences: Humanities Emphasis A.A. English B.A. English Option 4 Liberal Arts and Sciences: Humanities Emphasis A.A. French B.A.
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